Word: barnevik
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Percy Barnevik is in full flight, his long arms flinging one transparency after another onto the overhead projector to show figures from the latest European Union study on global competitiveness. "Pitiful," he snaps at one slide on Europe's low investment in Southeast Asia. "We are clearly losing ground," he says, slapping down a chart on the dwindling European share of world trade. When he finishes his downbeat presentation at the E.U. headquarters in Brussels, a reporter asks if he has any fresh proposals to solve the problems. "We don't need any more bright ideas. There are lots...
...assessment was like Barnevik himself: analytical, quick, blunt and, above all, global. As chairman of ABB Asea Brown Boveri, the world's largest electrical-engineering group, Barnevik, 57, presides over a $36 billion federation of more than 1,000 companies with 217,000 employees in 140 countries. Zurich-based ABB is the biggest single investor in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, a Western pioneer in India and an aggressive player in East Asia and Latin America. For three years running it was voted "Europe's most respected company" in a poll of executives by the Financial Times newspaper...
Last month Barnevik gave up the title of chief executive officer he had held since he created ABB in 1988 by fusing Sweden's Asea with Switzerland's BBC Brown Boveri. Though he will remain a strong presence at ABB, the move will give him time to preach his gospel of East-West economic cooperation to skeptical politicians, labor leaders and business executives. "This is something very close to my heart," he says. "If we can combine the low wages in the East with the high skills in the West, we can revitalize Europe." Barnevik believes the West...
This champion of globalization started life in a provincial setting: the isolated west coast of Sweden. Educated as an economist, Barnevik left a management-consulting job to help a troubled Swedish steel company. Success there led to the ceo spot at Asea, a large electrical-engineering firm then in decline. Barnevik carried out a radical and initially painful shake-up, dubbed "Percy's reign of terror...
...completed the ABB merger, Europe's biggest cross-border deal, in six weeks, following a key Barnevik rule: act fast, even at the risk of making mistakes. Or as the ABB "bible" he inspired puts it, "Not to take action is the only nonacceptable behavior...